A heartfelt consideration on navigating queer parenthood on one’s own terms, cathartic for both mother and daughter.
A queer, gender nonconforming mother directly addresses her daughter about self-esteem and beauty standards.
In a valiant and audacious effort to spare her daughter some of the discomforts of modern patriarchal restrictions and expectations, journalist Fairyington pens a book-length sentiment to her daughter countering the “active and hostile repudiation of what I, as a woman, am called upon, daily, to do: please the gaze of others, especially men (but women too).” She reflects on the longing she’d felt to “fuse my bloodline” with her longtime partner Sabrina’s, resulting in the complex decision to have her carry their daughter through a pregnancy fraught with biological and psychological challenges. At 49, Fairyington’s startling self-perception that she is ugly (“a word with fangs”) isn’t necessarily implied in a literal sense, but is, conversely, based on several factors: the manufactured conception of impossible beauty standards foisted on females like her by appearance-obsessed societal norms, her unapologetic queerness and sexual expression, and her gender dysmorphia. As mothers, she and Sabrina fret that their daughter will mature into a vapid culture that insists on a style of dress, appearance, sexuality, and identity curated by social trends and conformity rather than by personal choice and self-awareness. The main thrust of her passionate discourse is, naturally, to instill self-confidence in her daughter. Fairyington’s vulnerability is evident as she admits to the impact that becoming a mother has had on her life, her identity, and her precarious sense of self-worth. Through reflections on parenthood, LGBTQ+ historical context, and biting reprovals of American culture, Fairyington’s concerns for her impressionable offspring are valid, sharp, and urgent, yet eloquently conveyed in this hybrid of maternal love letter and cautionary counsel.
A heartfelt consideration on navigating queer parenthood on one’s own terms, cathartic for both mother and daughter.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593701881
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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